Book Review: Things That Make Us [Sic] makes me slightly ill

Apparently this blog has become sufficiently well-known that I have begun to receive gifts as a result of my writing. I don’t know why anyone would do such a thing, but I greatly appreciate it, because I love nothing more than free things. (It’s an unfortunate family trait.) Over the past few months, I’ve received a number of grammar books, and slowly it dawned on me that these weren’t truly free gifts; presumably, it would be proper for me to review the books I’ve received. And so I’m starting up a series of book reviews. If you have a book that you’d like to see reviewed, let me know (motivatedgrammar gmail com). If you have any thoughts about what you’d like to see in these reviews, also let me know.

The first book I’m going to review is the first one I received: Martha Brockenbrough‘s Things That Make Us [Sic]. Looking at the dust jacket when it arrived, I figured the book was just going to be like the Apostrophe Protection Society’s web page, a series of pictures of grammar errors with condescending finger-wagging. I was pleased to find that it was not a picture-book, but that was about the high point for me.

Brockenbrough, as you may know, is the founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. We don’t see eye-to-eye on grammar, so I was expecting to find that I’d mark up the book with red pen, gnashing my teeth all the while. That expectation was slightly off; while there were points I disagreed with, on the whole her advice was relatively uncontroversial, and she did include the now-obligatory section of debunked grammar myths. There were two points I strongly disagreed with:

People that I know should always be people who I know [debunked here and here]

Pretty minor disagreements, really. But then there was the part where for five pages Brockenbrough fantasizes that Justin Timberlake is checked into grammar rehab. At the climax of the fantasy, Timberlake reports to his grammar therapist that he has found an error in Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone: “When you got nothing, you got nothing left to lose,” notes Timberlake, ought to be “when you‘ve got nothing, you‘ve got nothing left to lose.”

The reader is stunned! Justin Timberlake, grammatical imbecile, has now been converted into the pedant we’d always hoped he’d be! His therapist responds, teary-eyed, “That’s where the artistry of the song comes in. […] Dylan is increasing the folsky feel of his song by playing a bit with the verb tenses.” I have absolutely no objection to that argument. That’s the point of poetic license, and I think the song would be slightly worse with the change. But to lionize Dylan for using a grammatical error to relate to his audience after excoriating Timberlake for his grammatical errors strikes me as a bit unfair — especially seeing what happens to Timberlake’s song after Brockenbrough corrects it! The original lyrics are:

“When you cheated, girl / My heart bleeded, girl.”

You wouldn’t mistake this couplet for Alexander Pope’s work, but it has a nice three-syllable end-rhyme. That long end-rhyme makes up for the repetition of girl; I think it’s cheap to rhyme two lines by repeating a word, but not if it’s as part of a long rhyme. I really don’t mind this, and in fact, the use of bleeded strikes me as charming. But putting my poetic sensibilities aside, here’s Brockenbrough’s preferred form:

“When you cheated, girl / My heart did bleed, girl.”

Oof. If ungrammaticality is the price we must pay to avoid lines like this, I accept the trade.

The book continues on like this, swapping between basic grammar lessons and these weird excursuses, many of which take the form of letters written by Brockenbrough to those who have incurred the wrath of SPOGG. As I mentioned above, the points in the grammar lessons were mostly valid. A few times Brockenbrough overreached in arguing that her usage preferences could be justified by improving clarity, and there was the occasional appearance of the recency illusion (i.e., claiming that some “error” is only recently attested when it’s actually been commonplace for years). Otherwise, I mostly agreed with her advice — or at least didn’t strongly oppose it — and, again, I did appreciate the mentioning of grammar myths at the end. I would have liked to see more convincing arguments against the myths, of course, but this book wasn’t written with me in mind. So, in terms of content, the book was alright. If you’re someone who makes a lot of common grammatical errors, the information is pretty good. People with pretty decent grammar, though, won’t get much out of it.

But, alas, I’m not here to tell you the book is alright, and that’s because I had two stylistic problems with the book. I wish these points hadn’t skewed my opinion so much, but these were huge distractions, and are the things that still stick in my craw after putting the book down. First, the whole book has that creepy but-of-course-I’m-only-joking vibe that makes me extremely uncomfortable. Some of the jokes were funny, like the proposal that Dekalb, Illinois be renamed “Deka#”. (Pound symbol, “lb”, get it?) But the self-righteous-haha-it’s-meta! tone of the letters and other excursuses quickly grows tiresome. For instance, immediately following the discussion that staunch can be a verb, but shouldn’t, there is a letter to Rep. Jay Inslee, condescendingly reprimanding him for using staunch as a verb — even though the previous page said it’s technically acceptable! The letters aren’t really funny — they’re nagging, they’re awkward, and they usually harp on obvious points, like correcting obvious spelling errors in text messages. And, outside the letters, there’s this one paragraph where Brockenbrough goes moderately insane, launching ad hominem attacks against people who don’t fawn over apostrophes. Sure, I get that it’s all probably supposed to be an over-the-top joke, but after two hundred pages of it, it’s hard to believe there’s no truth underlying the jest.

I’d perhaps have been able to overlook this joking-or-am-I? tone of the book if it weren’t for the fact that the whole book is written in first-person plural, or as Brockenbrough calls it when writing to the Queen of England, “the royal we”. It starts off on page 2, when Brockenbrough writes “As we write, Billboard‘s list of top-selling albums contains two serious spelling errors.” (One of the errors, by the way, is kingz, which I would be reluctant to call serious.) Perhaps there is a ghostwriter to this book, but otherwise, this usage is just weird. It continues throughout the book; I didn’t notice a single instance of I or me or myself or my in the book, except in quotes or example sentences. This is also standard practice on the SPOGG website and blog, although not in Brockenbrough’s Encarta column. I get the idea; Brockenbrough is claiming to speak for the SPOGG as a whole. Maybe that’s standard practice for people who found organizations and write books — I’ve done neither, so I wouldn’t know. But when you’re talking about grammar, which is so idiosyncratic, I doubt one can speak for the membership as a whole. The use of this royal we throughout really grated on me, especially as it felt like a crutch. It was as though Brockenbrough wasn’t confident enough in her grammatical opinions, and had to constantly imply that other people felt the same way she did.

So, on the whole, the book has some good points: it’s not overly prescriptivist, it argues against some common grammar myths, and it has some decent jokes. It’s a quick and easy read as well, and does a pretty good job of explaining some less intuitive aspects of grammar. But those are needles of goodness lost in a haystack of poorly justified condescension, royal wes, only-half-joking tones, and discomfitting fantasies. It’s like Eats, Shoots and Leaves if Lynne Truss weren’t quite so mean.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

Ridger: You know, since Timberlake is a speaker of American English, he would almost certainly pronounce “bleeded” and “bleated” the same. So he wouldn’t have to change the song at all to use your suggestion; he’d just have to change two letters in the published lyrics. And I think the who/whom distinction might — and I stress might, because I’m looking at the book right now — have been one of the rules she said she was willing to let die. don’t quote me on that, though.

“Clear, grammatical communication is society’s foundation. It is what helps us understand and be understood. If we let that bedrock crumble from neglect, or if we actively chip away at it in a misguided fit of anti-intellectualism, then we run the risk of watching the world around us collapse.”

She only gives two examples: a missing comma in “Let’s eat children” and how “inflammable” does not mean “flame-resistant”. In what way do these examples lead to the collapse of the world around us? Then on page 4 she writes:

“These are unlikely misunderstandings, but that doesn’t mean there are no risks to sloppy English. If you don’t speak or write well, others are likely to assume you are stupid, uneducated, or both.”

So which is it? Is bad grammar going to cause society’s collapse, or is it just a social marker?

The “just joking: hah hah” strategy is one I find particularly distasteful. It is the technique of a schoolyard bully called on the carpet by someone in authority: “Ah, shucks. It was just a joke. What, don’t you have a sense of humor?” We see this a lot in pop grammar books. If I read a review of such a book which praises its humor, I understand this to mean that the author is hurtful and cowardly.

As for the bit raised by the previous commenter about bad grammar leading to chaos in the streets, I routinely challenge these people to point to one civilization in human history which collapse due to linguistic failings. I had one guy try to argue that Arnold Toynbee would have agree with him, had Toynbee actually written about grammar. That was the closest thing to a coherent argument I have seen.

goofy: Well, clearly — to judge by Brockenbrough’s choice of examples — bad grammar leads to the immolation and consumption of children, and I would imagine, although I’m not a sociologist by any means, that this would undermine the functioning of a society. Would it cause a collapse? I don’t know; she may be being a bit hyperbolic there, but I’d be willing to accept the hypothesis that it would hinder development.

Richard: Those are both great points. I may start using that rationale: “Einstein agreed with me, he just never happened to mention it in his writings!” I just need to figure out the best authority figure to appeal to.

Maybe my question should have been: how does bad grammar lead to the immolation and consumption of children? I assume that Brockenbrough doesn’t really think that a missing comma will cause people to eat children, or that parents will set their children’s pajamas on fire because they’re labeled “inflammable”.

goofy: Ah yes, that’s a good point. My dad gave me a welder’s jacket as a present when I was an undergraduate. He told me it was flame-retardant, and when I told my friends at school, we of course had to test the limits of this by setting parts of it on fire. (It would burn if exposed to heat for long enough; the flame retardancy just meant that the flames would not spread.) Now, obviously, we weren’t so dumb as to set it aflame while wearing it. (Perhaps this is not obvious.) So I could see someone out there saying “Inflammable? Let’s test that hypothesis!”

The key difference is that while you or I have sufficient faith in our fellow humans to assume they wouldn’t run this experiment with the child in the pajamas, Brockenbrough and other sky-is-falling grammarians have no faith whatsoever in humanity. It seems as though they think that if you are stupid enough to confuse “there” and “their”, then you’re stupid enough to set a child on fire.

All that said, I completely agree with you. The whole “bad grammar will destroy the Republic” argument is unsupported idiocy.

I don’t worry much about people who confuse “their” and “there”. I sincerely doubt anybody doesn’t understand which word they mean when they’re speaking. The same with “its” and “it’s” – until I hear someone say “My dog really hates it is new jacket”, I’m guessing it’s a spelling error. Writing the wrong homophone is easy, and typing the wrong one incredibly easy – and for a lot of reasons, they’re easy to make and hard to spot. But to think a misspelling is The End of The Republic (or The WORLD) is overreacting quite a bit.